Facebook business page: post times & frequency

To maximize your Facebook page’s organic reach & engagement, it’s important to know when and how often to post content. Here we’ll take a look at the times and frequencies of your posts; next time we’ll talk about the types of content you can post.

When should I post?

There really is no correct time. It depends on your brand, your audience/fans, and your time zone.

When we say that it depends on your audience, we mean that you should post when they are online. (You can see this on your page: Insights > Posts > When Your Fans Are Online.) What you see will obviously reflect who your audience is: stay-at-home parents, students, night-shift workers, and so forth.

However, if they are online during peak times (usually from 9am to 5pm), this could pose a problem. Most Facebook pages, as well as FB friends, post during this time, which means that your business page will have to contend with others.

TrackMaven, an intelligence software for digital marketers, found that posting to Facebook before and after working hours resulted in an increase in news feed visibility and engagement (such as clicks, likes, shares, and comments).

Therefore, try posting during off-peak times. I find that posting an hour or two before the peak time hits is effective. Keep in mind that even if you manage to find the best time to post, people still won’t interact with your content if it doesn’t offer something engaging – useful or interesting.

How often should I post?

A lot of people say the more, the better. But there are limits to this suggestion.

Even if it increases your total engagement for the day, posting more frequently doesn’t necessarily increase the engagement per post. In fact, it may even decrease it. I’ve noticed that posting too many times in one day – especially close together – results in unfollows and unlikes, which decreases your page’s organic reach.

Then again, posting only once a day or less means that some of your fans might miss your posts (unless they check your actual page very often, which is rare). Plus, posting at different times increases your chances of reaching more of your fans, as people go online at various times.

I suggest posting 1-3 times a day (obviously more if you’re a news page, for example). If you post more than once, it’s extremely important that your spread them out during the day – no one likes visiting their news feed and seeing posts from only one page.

Note: If you don’t have anything good to post, don’t just post something random for the sake of it. Your content must be something worthwhile to your fans, otherwise they’ll have negative reactions (spam, reporting, etc.) and your overall engagement will suffer.

– – –

I’m not the biggest fan of automatic scheduling, but I have to admit that tools like Buffer and Hootsuite really help when it comes to posting. Consider using them if you find that you can’t always be online during your posting times. Facebook itself has a tool that allows you to schedule posts.

Apart from posting relevant and valuable content, what’s most important here is that you’re consistent. Sure, you can experiment with different times and frequencies, but once you find the optimal schedule, make sure you stick to it.

If you don’t have enough time or energy to do this, Have Presence can help. We do smart, manual updates based on sound judgment and collaboration. This includes monitoring online conversations about your brand, to ensure the best management of your Facebook business page.